Dinosaurs on the Ark?

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) is best-known for her excellent mystery novels featuring detective Lord Peter Wimsey. She was a good friend of Christian apologist and Narnia author C. S. Lewis.

But Sayers was also a Biblical creationist prior to the resurgence of the modern creation movement. (This resurgence is usually marked with the February 1961 publishing of The Genesis Flood by Professors Henry Morris and John Whitcomb.)

In the early 1950’s Sayers authored a children’s advent calendar The Story of Noah’s Ark illustrated by Fritz Wegner. Three pages of text accompanied a full-color illustration with calendar doors that open. The text is a detailed description of the picture depicting the gathering of animal kinds to board the Ark shortly before the impending Flood.

Sayers wrote, “Yes, to be sure there were Dragons in the Ark, or there wouldn’t have been one for St. George to fight with; but they are all dead now.”

The dragon is pictured at the lower left of the illustration. Dragon is the old word for “dinosaur” which was only coined in 1841 by creationist scientist Dr. Richard Owen.

Sayers logically deduces the existence of dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark from the fact that history records St. George fighting one and that Genesis records all air-breathing animals outside the Ark died (Genesis 6:17; 7:21-23).

This was a remarkable statement from Sayers demonstrating her fidelity to Biblical truth in a day when most people scoffed at the idea that dinosaurs were on the Ark.

Actually there’s substantial historical evidence of man with dinosaurs in addition to the St. George instance cited by Sayers. Battles between ancient mariners and great sea monsters were likely encounters with ocean dinosaurs which once swam the seas that supported their enormous bodies. Dragon legends are surely based on real confrontations with dinosaurs.

Dinosaur pictographs and carvings on cave walls provide extra-Biblical evidence that man knew dinosaurs. Job depicts the terror of human interaction with Behemoth and Leviathan (Job 40:15-41:34). The Bible has some 50 references from Genesis to Revelation to monsters or dragons or animals which were likely dinosaurs.

Sayers also answered the questions skeptics like to ask when told dinosaurs accompanied Noah on the Ark: “What happened to the dinosaurs if they were on the Ark?” Obviously, as Sayers says, they died out…at least to the extent of current knowledge. There are yet-to-be-verified reports of dinosaurs from the jungles of Africa and plesiosaurs in isolated deep lakes (see Live plesiosaur in Lake Windermere, England).

Belief in the truth of Scriptural history and straightforward logic led Sayers to her inescapable conclusion: dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark.